News of the Week

In science news around the world this week, Japan's nuclear crisis is dragging on, two new studies support an Asian source for Haiti's cholera outbreak, U.K. scientists took a new accelerator on a test run, oceanographers have found the remains of Air France Flight 447 in the South Atlantic Ocean, and Brazil's science ministry is creating a commission on scientific integrity after Elsevier said it would retract 11 papers, the senior author of which is a chemist at the State University of Campinas.

This week's Newsmakers are Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, who is moving to Seattle to become chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and astrophysicist Martin Rees, who has been awarded the Templeton Foundation's annual prize for his "profound insights on the cosmos [that] have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity's highest hopes and worst fears."

The biggest animals ever to walk the Earth are about to invade the Big Apple. A new scanning-and-prototyping technique has helped to explain why Knut, the world-famous polar bear, died suddenly in front of hundreds of shocked visitors to the Berlin Zoological Garden last month. And this week's numbers quantify India's population and the zettabytes of business-related information processed by the world's computer servers in 2008.

News & Analysis

Regulatory agencies in both the United States and Europe are soon expected to green-light the first two antiviral drugs specifically developed to treat chronic hepatitis C, a treacherous infection that can cause cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer, often decades after infection occurs.

Researchers have long projected that they will not glimpse the first signs that the Antarctic ozone hole is healing until well past 2020. But for the first time, a group of researchers claims they can already see the ozone hole slowly recovering.

Last month saw the launch of the South University of Science and Technology of China, a bold challenge to the country's education system that enrolls high-flying students nominated not only for their grades but also for their creativity and passion for learning.

Last week, a key congressional panel heard proposals to retain the "best and brightest" foreign students without disadvantaging U.S. workers. But the approach of the 2012 elections means the political window of opportunity won't stay open for very long.

In a 5-year plan launched this month, Singapore will boost public spending on research by 20% compared with spending during the previous 5 years. This largesse comes with a price: The government is demanding more economic bang from its research bucks.

News Focus

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been taking a closer look at the impact of biotech crops on organic farms. Research is providing tools to help them thrive side by side, but the politics are tricky.

For Carol Mallory-Smith of Oregon State University, the migration of genes in agricultural crops is not just a research topic or a matter of policy debate. It's the cause of a vexing quarrel among her neighbors: the farmers of Oregon's Willamette Valley.

A team of theorists reported at the American Physical Society meeting that a film of ice only two molecules thick may form the oddest of all crystalline structures, a so-called quasicrystal, which lacks the exact repeatability of an ordinary crystal structure but preserves other symmetries of a crystal.

While erasing information, a tiny system can sometimes generate less than the minimum amount of heat required by a principle of thermodynamics, physicists reported at the American Physical Society meeting.

Snapshots from the American Physical Society meeting include lowering the energy of a vibrating widget enough to achieve the least motion allowed by quantum mechanics—the so-called ground state of motion—and a network model that demonstrates that if 10% of the members of a group hold an unshakable conviction, their view will eventually win out.

About The Cover

COVER When certain materials drop below a critical temperature, they enter a superconducting phase characterized by zero electrical resistance. A readily visualized signature of the superconducting state is the ability to expel magnetic fields. In this photo, a magnet placed on top of the ceramic yttrium barium copper oxide levitates as the temperature drops below 123 kelvin and the material becomes superconducting. See the special section beginning on page 189. Photo: Takeshi Takahara/Photo Researchers, Inc.